Category: Problem-solving & overcoming delusions

It can be so very useful, indeed powerful; and we can gain some deep levels of concentration and mindfulness with it. While we remain in that state of peace, when thoughts arise we don’t feel the same need to dwell on them – we sense the space around them and the space within them.

We can let even disturbing thoughts come and we can let them go. We are free from the mental chain reactions induced by the habit of over-thinking. We are more present – not worrying about the future or dwelling on the past. We can stop identifying with our thoughts, as explained more in this article, understanding that:

What’s next?

However, within minutes our meditation will come to an end and we’ll have to get up and get on. And even though we’ve tasted that space — and in fact even if we have some insight that things are more virtual reality than they seem — daily appearances can be very overpowering very quickly. We get sucked in.

In which case our delusions might quite likely not just rear their heads again but take over — possibly within minutes! — and we’ll be obliged to go back to our normal, crazy way of reacting to things as if they are solid, real, and outside our mind.

So, we need to take our spiritual practice further and get rid of delusions altogether by applying the antidotes of Dharma (Buddha’s teachings) both in and out of meditation.

When we do that breathing meditation, the first step, we feel the pure, clear, spacious peace that we already have inside us once we allow our delusions and their objects to simply subside. We give ourselves a break, giving ourselves permission to let go, relax, and take refuge in the peace of our own minds. And this in itself is evidence that our actual problems are created by our mind, because, when we let go of the thoughts of attachment and other delusions, our mind is at peace. The problem is gone; it actually just goes away.

Within that understanding, we train in Dharma to change our way of thinking about or holding onto things. Our mind and its objects — or our thoughts and what’s appearing to those thoughts — are co-dependent (not in a bad way!) Because they co-arise and depend upon each other completely, then when our way of looking at other people and the world changes, those objects change too. Literally change.

I think we’ve all had this experience.

Moving on naturally

For example, if the person we are currently attached to has not replied to our 25 texts, we might feel desperate, holding them as neglectful and ourselves as unlovable. But instead of dropping this storyline, we’re like a dog with a bone. We try to wrestle with that person mentally, physically, verbally — whatever we think it will take to get them to change and start being nice to us again. We believe we need this to happen so that we can feel good about them again. AND good about ourselves.

To that end, we send a text, “Hey, do you like me?” We know it’s lame and will cause our self-respect to sink even further, but we can’t help it. We have to do something.

Seems like we’re always trying subtle and less subtle ways to get other people to cooperate, to get them to do what we want them to do. And it’s a bit of a battle, isn’t it? Because, funnily enough, they’ve got their own ideas and self-interest. And meanwhile we’re just exacerbating the problem because we are trying to solve it with the very same mind that is creating it.

But then one day, just naturally, even without deliberately changing our thoughts, we realize: “Actually I don’t care any more what this person thinks or does! Cool.” A cloud lifts. Our attachment has lessened. Maybe it’s even gone away. And at that point the problem’s gone, the battle is over. We have moved on, as they say.

We are now free to view that person and ourselves in a different way. We can establish a better kind of connection with them, maybe keeping the love part while ditching the attachment. This too can happen quite naturally — sometimes we discover we can feel quite warmly toward someone we were really upset about. Sometimes we can’t even remember what we were upset about, and it doesn’t matter anymore.

So, on Wednesday that person can seem like a major problem. And this is from their own side I might add – it is their bad behavior causing our pain and self-contempt. We wander around thinking, “It’s their fault I feel this way. It’s their fault, it’s their fault, they need to change.” That’s what we think, isn’t it, when we have attachment or aversion? It’s their fault. But then on Thursday we wake up and think, “Actually, I don’t have a problem with this person anymore.” We’ve let go, moved on. At which point the person appears very differently, do they not? And we are happy and confident in ourselves again – back to being cool and mysterious. (At which point they may start texting us again … just sayin’. Doesn’t matter either way though.)

That person hasn’t had to do a single thing from Wednesday to Thursday. They’re just going about their merry way, as usual, ignoring us or not, as usual. They haven’t done anything, but our thoughts have changed, and so suddenly they’ve changed and we ourselves have changed. When we think about them, it’s: “Oh they’re not so bad. I could be friendly with them again.” Maybe we can even think, “I really want them to be happy.” At which point they’re no longer a source of pain but a source of happiness for us.

The three spheres

And we are now identifying ourselves as, or imputing ourselves on, a loving, whole person, no longer a neurotic needy one. Again, these changes have not come from that person’s side, but because there’s a dependent relationship between our thoughts and their objects, including our self. Our mind and its objects arise together.

We have these kinds of experiences all the time, even without practicing Dharma. When our delusions naturally abate through time, the problem goes away and we’re free to have a totally different experience of that other person, relationship, and self. These are called “the three spheres”. They are all empty of existing from their own side.

Moving on more quickly

So, with Dharma, what we’re doing is understanding this connection between our thoughts and their objects and then changing our thoughts deliberately. This means we don’t have to wait for weeks, months, or years for our attachment to go away on its own, or for our aversion to subside, or for our disappointment or frustration or anxiety to fade. Through Dharma, we no longer have to wait for our thoughts to exhaust themselves. We can actually seize control over our own minds, rather than (as Buddha pointed out) having our minds control us, which is our current predicament. Our thoughts are no longer calling all the shots, because we are.

Through the meditations on renunciation, compassion, and wisdom we can learn to let go of our attachment, aversion, and other delusions, and in an instant be relating to ourselves and others in a happier way. And when we love other people — genuinely love them, not mixed with attachment or conditionality, just wanting them to be happy — then they present no problem for us. If they are an object of our attachment or aversion, they are a problem for us; but as soon as they become an object of our love, they’re no longer a problem for us. Quite the opposite, in fact. They become a source of joy, even if they’ve let us down. Does that make sense?

Love, compassion, and so on are our greatest wealth because they will always help us solve our problems and find happiness. And this is because our problems don’t exist outside the mind. Nothing exists outside our mind. Nothing is independent of our perceptions and thoughts.

If we understand that objects depend on the subjective mind, we can change the way objects appear to us by changing our own mind. Gradually we will gain the ability to control our mind and in this way solve all our problems.

Geshe Kelsang explains in his Mahamudra teachings how subject minds and object things arise simultaneously from the root mind like waves. Whatever we are experiencing or thinking about in any given moment, we cannot separate our thoughts out from their objects. Everything that appears to us entirely depends on the quality of our consciousness, or our thoughts. So, if we have a thought of irritation or anger, we have an object of irritation or anger. If we change that irritation into love, we have an object of love.

As we may know from Buddha’s wisdom teachings, everything is dreamlike. What appears to our mind depends entirely upon the mind itself. This is why Dharma works. Pure and simple – this is why it works. Change our mind, change our world. Literally. Not just tweak our world, not just make incremental changes, but change it. Transform it from the inside out.

Common experience

If we gain some experience of this peace and transformation, we have something to give, do we not? If we understand how our own thoughts operate, we can understand the same for others; and, feeling this common experience, are now more able to be there for them. We can help others, eg, give them some badly-needed encouragement or advice, because we’ve done it ourselves. Dharma is a win win. We help ourselves, we help the people we love, we help everybody.

In Buddhism, we train to solve our own and everybody else’s problems through compassion and wisdom.

This is a bit different to the usual way we try to solve them, to be honest, which is generally through attachment and aversion.

Out of attachment to a world outside our thoughts, a world in fact projected by our ignorance, we wish and sometimes expect things to turn out a certain way and people to behave a certain way. We’re constantly going outside of ourselves to get what we want and get others to cooperate with our wishes.

But it doesn’t really work, does it? Because we still don’t have everything we want and, even when we do get the things we want, we lose them. And then we get disappointed and upset. Worldly pleasures, as Buddha explained, are like scratching an itch. Indulging in them just satisfies the itch that’s created by our attachment in the first place.

In this way, attachment is a bit of an inner demon, deceiving us; but it’s sometimes hard for us to recognize this because we feel it’s what’s making us happy. This is our habit. We’ve always used our attachment to go out and try and get what we think we want.

And with aversion we try to push away the things out there that seem to be getting in the way of our happiness — people or situations that seem to be threatening us or harming us in any way. And this makes our mind unpeaceful. We don’t like things. We don’t like people, and we want them to behave differently, or go away. We are not in control – we have to push out mentally, verbally, and/or physically.

We’ve been doing this since beginningless time, trying to solve our problems with our attachment and aversion, and for that matter all our other delusions too; but it doesn’t seem to be working, does it?! Because here we all are, still probably with the same number of problems we started with this life, or this morning, and still without all the things we want, or, even if we got them, still wanting more.

Newsflash: We cannot solve our problems through our delusions when it is our delusions that are creating our problems in the first place.

So, with Dharma (ie, Buddha’s teachings and the experiences we gain from practicing those teachings) we learn to become what’s called “inner beings”, appreciating more and more that the way to solve our problems is to change our minds. And on one level it may sound obvious, but it can’t be that obvious to us or we’d be doing it all the time. It may be intellectually obvious to us, but at the moment we have the deeply ingrained emotional habit of trying to solve our pain and problems outside of our mind. We try to get what we want by rearranging stuff outside of our mind.

What we need to do is change these habits and approach our problems with wisdom and compassion, which have the power to solve all our problems not just straightaway but permanently.

To get started …

When we start our training in meditation and Dharma, we need first to learn to experience our own inner peace by allowing our minds to relax and settle. Otherwise it is no wonder we feel we have to get our happiness from out there. Even Dharma seems to be something we have to find from out there.

What we come to understand when we start meditating (skillfully) is that Dharma is already within us. We already have the seeds of everything we need inside us, including a naturally peaceful, blissful mind. We may have heard this many times, but sometimes we forget. We also forget that peace equals happiness, and that when our mind is experiencing peace we don’t have problems.

So the very first step is learning to rely on that inner peace — identifying with just how good we feel when we allow our mind to relax and just forget those stupid delusions for awhile. We can do this through breathing meditations, relaxing into our heart, clarity of the mind, and so on. This is the first way we usually taste that freedom, that peace we have inside us. We can relax into it and think:

This is me. I’m home.

We really need to give ourselves a break and, by letting our mind chill out, see how our aversion and attachment settle down a bit, like waves disappearing into the ocean of our root mind. We can let this go. We can let our thoughts go. And when we let our thoughts go, their objects go as well; so for awhile we’re simply free of that problem! We feel peaceful inside, it’s like, “Hey, I don’t have a problem!” If we can just forget it though breathing meditation, we feel COMPLETELY FINE.

And it doesn’t matter what the problem is, to be honest. Any problem can be temporarily solved through breathing meditation if we get good at it. Or even if we’re not that good at it. Just by allowing ourself to focus on our breath, or relaxing into our heart, we get a little peace, a little space from that problem. And we stop, at least for a short while, trying to solve those problems OUT THERE, in that most frustrating way we normally have. We relax, we rest, we experience this feeling of contentment and think:

“That’s incredible. I have this peace inside me. I can relax. And, you know what? This indicates that there is so much more where this came from. This is just the beginning of the peace I can experience if I change direction — from trying to solve everything outside myself to just allowing myself to practice these teachings and change my mind. This is only the beginning, but I can rely on it — I can understand that this peace is how I can be feeling all the time, and it is who I am.”

At the moment we are so habituated to following our attachment wherever it takes us, or our aversion trying to solve everything out there all the time. These delusions are what’s shaking up our minds and causing us so much aggravation, pain, frustration, tightness, heaviness, sadness, depression, not to mention negative actions, etc., etc., etc. IT’S OUR DELUSIONS. We get a glimpse into that simply by experiencing some temporary freedom from those delusions. We should really take refuge in that peace, knowing we can always go there.

Then we can arise from that peace with a clearer mind and happier heart, more centered and better able to deal practically with the so-called outer problems that present themselves.

Next installment is here. Meanwhile, your comments are always welcome.

A guest article by a modern Buddhist practitioner who works full time as a manager of software engineer teams.

In Buddha’s teachings on training our mind, he says that we need to identify, reduce, and remove our delusions.

This is often unskillfully interpreted to mean that delusions are inherently bad and we should not have them in our mind. As a result of this, when a delusion arises in our mind we develop aversion to it. This is then compounded by grasping at a self that shouldn’t be deluded, but is. We then believe that this deluded self is true and real, and develop discouragement, feeling that we are hopeless and will never be able to improve our mind.

This entire process is summed up in a text I received recently from a Sangha friend asking for advice, which read: “I am getting nervous, and hate when I feel like this”. Unfortunately, this approach to “controlling our mind” usually leads to repressing our delusions. As a result, we aren’t even doing the first step of identifying them because we are pushing them away too fast with aversion.

Our delusions are our greatest teacher

As we are often reminded, the opponent to anger is patient acceptance. In this case, to fix the aversion to having delusions in our mind, we need patient acceptance with the fact that they are arising.

When painful feelings arise in our mind, there is no need to panic; we can patiently accept them, experience them, and investigate their nature and where they come from.

We can apply this same advice to our deluded states of mind. If we are getting irritated, great! Frustrated, excellent! Nervous, bring it on! Accept the delusion is there in our mind. Experience it and know exactly how it functions. Investigate it to see how it is distorting reality. Learn precisely how each delusion develops and functions in your mind.

If we approach our delusions in this way, then there is so much to be learned from them. Just like understanding the movements of an army makes them easy to defeat in combat, so understanding how our delusions work in our mind takes away their ability to harm us.

More delusions, please

If we are training in martial arts, then we look forward to sparring because it helps us improve our fighting technique. If we are training our mind, then who are we going to spar with? Delusions! The stronger our delusions, the more opportunity we have to go deeper in our practice. As one of my teachers often says, “Super samsara, super nirvana”!

If we learn to practice like this, then we begin to be able to use our delusions to benefit both ourselves and others. As Geshe-la says in How to Understand the Mind:

Bodhisattvas on the first and second grounds experience ordinary attachment, but this does not disturb their spiritual practice, and they are able to use it as a means of benefiting others. Just as farmers use unpleasant things such as manure to create favorable conditions for growing crops, so Bodhisattvas use their attachment as a means of helping others.

Its worth noting that accepting delusions in our mind doesn’t mean that we allow them to stay there forever. The point is that we are aiming to reduce and abandon them all permanently. What it does mean is that we don’t push them away. Instead we examine them, learn from them, and develop more mental fortitude every day. It may take us years to remove our delusions completely using wisdom, so in the meantime, why not enjoy them?

After writing this article, I am honestly looking forward to the next time I get deluded, and hope that you are as well!

A friend just told me that the Republicans are winning by 36,000 votes in this great state of Colorado. It gave me pause, again!, as so many times I have been wondering of late, hey, what’s going on?!

(Apologies to my subscribers for popping a second article into your inbox so soon after the last one, but I thought it a civic duty to put one out about the election today 😅 And it’ll still be relevant tomorrow, I’m betting.)

Yes, I’m writing this slap bang in the middle of election day 2016, November 8th, 3.56pm MST. It is also Tara Day, thank goodness. For everyone everywhere has the jitters, or almost everyone, ordinary beings at least – whereas Buddha Tara & co. of course do not. This is on account of their fully mastering their hearts and minds.

My hair stylist (yes, why not have a haircut on election day) just told me that the reason he thinks visits to doctors for anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, and the like have spiked by 25% during this election season is because the world is more complicated than ever before and people feel more and more like they are losing control, that they are powerless. And I agreed with him. I also told him I would be putting him in my blog, so here you go Jason, I am a woman of my word.

If there is anything this confounding reality show of an election is showing it is that everything depends on the mind. Problems or non-problems, happiness and suffering, and ugliness and attractiveness – these all depend on the mind.

Problem, no problem

That thing about outer and inner problems has never been demonstrably more true than today. I’m sorry to break this to you, if you haven’t heard, but we will never ever have full control over the outer problems in life — no one throughout history has ever accomplished this and we are not going to be the first. However, we can learn to control how we react and therefore avoid the inner problems. This is always going to be the case.

Where we feel helpless, also, it is helpful not to forget the power of prayer – one prayer suggested on 9/11 by Geshe Kelsang, and seemingly always applicable, is for our world leaders to have compassion and wisdom.

Happiness and suffering

Happiness and suffering depend on the mind – people with just the same amount to win or lose from the results of this election still vary in how happy or sad they are today, for example, depending on their state of mind and perceptions. Some people are feeling very depressed whereas others are figuring a way through it while remaining relatively peaceful. But we could all probably do with taking deeper and deeper refuge in the restorative power of our own mind and potential, as explained here, and the foolproof Dharma medicine, the methods for fulfilling this happiness within. This election has been showing me the need for more refuge, not more dependence on externals.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Ugliness and attractiveness also depend on the mind. And there is a lot of that going on right now – including incomprehension on both sides as to how anyone cannot see through the quite obvious undesirability of the other candidate. Yes, I have my preference and my own incomprehension, and I voted carefully on every point on the ballot; but from a spiritual point of view it doesn’t make much difference who wins this election, for tomorrow our main opponents are still going to be ignorance, attachment, and aversion. Our real work is still going to be cut out for us, either way.

Search for the hero inside yourself

It is wrong to hate Hilary. It is wrong to hate Trump. (Attachment for one would also appear to lead to more aversion toward the other, so best not to succumb to deceptive attachment either.) And it is also wrong to hate both of them! It is short-sighted, and it doesn’t come from any real compassion.

There is much at stake during this election season, no doubt — such as my ability to go to the doctor and, more ominously, the legitimization of fear and hate. Still, there is no justification for our own aversion because, as Buddha pointed out and we can discover for ourselves, living beings are not our enemies, they are our kind mothers. Only our delusions are our enemies. As Geshe Kelsang says:

We may think that our suffering is caused by other people, by poor material conditions, or by society, but in reality it all comes from our own deluded states of mind. ~ Introduction to Buddhism

And it is not as if Geshe-la has not put this to the test – he had to flee Tibet with just his robes, and before that he lived in a feudal dictatorship.

He has also suggested that we vote in order to keep creating the causes for living in a democracy.

We are the change we’ve been waiting for

So we can canvass and vote to try and stop the most dangerous delusions taking power, trying to solve the outer problem as best we can; I am all for this and, in fact, Bodhisattvas have a vow to “go to the assistance of those in need”. But let’s not kid ourselves that our real enemies are either of those two people, or any other politicians for that matter. Even if both of them were to vanish into thin air, the world will still be in a mess for as long as we are all enslaved by the master race of the delusions.

I wonder why we have allowed delusions to ruin our lives since beginningless time and counting?! Why are we so wholly consumed by finding the threat to our happiness always outside ourselves? As Shantideva puts it:

The inner enemies of hatred, attachment, and so forth
Do not have arms and legs,
Nor do they have courage or skill;
So how have they made me their slave?

No other type of enemy
Can remain for as long a time
As can the enduring foes of my delusions,
For they have no beginning and no apparent end.

The only way to be free and stay free is to free the mind – by removing our delusions, and particularly by getting rid of self-grasping ignorance. I reckon that if I had put a fraction of my formidable energy and righteous indignation since beginningless time into rebelling against my own delusions, I’d probably be enlightened by now. And so would you. This election is reminding me of this, so for that at least I am thankful to all concerned.

Have a nice rest of election day, what’s left of it! See you later.

Update 10.55pm

My conclusion: This divisive and disappointing (was always going to be for half the country and now is for much of the world) election has shown, yet again and quite resoundingly in my opinion, that trying to make samsara work is a red herring. The arc of forward progression — of tolerance, human rights, international security, climate protection, and global connectivity for example — is not an inevitability. While we let the obstructionist delusions stay in our hearts, it is a pipe dream.

But there is also little point in panicking or scare mongering because, lets face it, we wouldn’t have known what was around the corner whoever was elected.

As Buddha said over 2500 years ago, the places, enjoyments, and bodies of samsara are deceptive. Nowhere on this planet is great to live, so let’s instead give up entirely on the hallucinations that come from our self-grasping and self-cherishing. It is about time, and it won’t be a minute too soon. And meantime, as we work on pulling the plug out on the ocean of samsaric suffering by abandoning its causes, let’s not underestimate the power of prayer, “our main job” as Geshe Kelsang once said.

Heruka’s mandala, the appearance of bliss and emptiness, awaits us all, is just a trick of the mind away. Get your Highest Yoga Tantra empowerments when you can.

Perhaps you might join me in trying even harder to rely on the armor of wisdom and compassion, becoming a true refuge for ourselves and others as soon as possible, while we still have health care … I mean this precious human life 😝

If you can, please add to the comments below any inspiring words or quotes that are helping you heal and deal with what is going on, and might help others. The more wisdom, the better.

Like this:

I have been at the Fall Festival in Toronto this week, which has been an incredible pleasure, one that could only have been improved upon if you had all been here as well. During one lunch with my old friend G from Florida and his charming new wife S, who is relatively new to Buddhism, she asked me how it is that living beings are experiencing suffering if that suffering is not “real”, or inherently existent – that is, if the suffering we normally see does not exist?

A similar question came up during the Tantric Q & A, to which Gen-la Jampa gave a beautiful reply. Only I didn’t take notes so you’ll have to wait for that. Unless someone feels like typing up their notes on that for us all in the comments section … ah, done, thank you, see below.

But I know that S has 3 crazy little mini-schnauzers, and so what I said to her was this.

Imagine that Murphy is sleeping on that huge big bed with you and G, and he is fine, all safe and cozy. But you see that he is whimpering and twitching, and you know he is having a nightmare. You know that he is not “really” suffering, but that is not how he is seeing it at the moment. He believes that the big dog is actually attacking him or the black squirrel has outwitted him yet again or that his family have really deserted him (etc, etc, whatever). But you know that all this is mere appearance to his dreaming mind, and so all you want to do is wake him up.

The Buddhas feel the same way about us. All the time.

It’s a fine mess we have gotten ourselves into …

In a surreal counterpoint to this sane, harmonious Pure Land of the Festival was the divisive second US presidential debate – Greek drama or tragedy, take your pick. Jaws worldwide were dropping. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Only we did, between us. Please by all means vote on November 8; I certainly am going to. However, I have also concluded that the only way to cure these weird appearances and resultant widespread discomfort and delusion is to focus on developing compassion for everyone concerned (including the Rocky Mountain Trump supporter sitting next to me on this flight, who is drinking lots of beer and trying to sleep the whole thing off). Not to take these politics too seriously, if I even could, but to remember to purify it nonetheless, remembering that it is all dream-like karmic appearance. (Perhaps it is even better that it is now “out” rather than “in”, providing it encourages us to do something about it.) For the alternative to purifying it is buying into it and experiencing an increasingly tangled mess.

I was moved by the last question of the debate, when an earnest undecided voter asked the candidates to please name one thing that they actually respected about each other — and they did both come up with something. The atmosphere in the town hall immediately softened. There was some opening. Everyone could breathe a little more freely. You saw the possibility of sanity and kindness being restored one day. All in the space of a few minutes. I know the clouds rolled back in again almost straightaway, but there was a glimpse for a moment there of sky-like Buddha nature.

Centered in the solution

We think to cure suffering that we need to focus on the problem. But Buddhas never focus on the problem out of the context of being centered in the solution. How are we going to help others if we hold them to be inherently problematic? There is no space — there is no room to bring out their potential, their pure nature, their kindness or clarity or peace. All we can do is try and patch things up, shuffle things around, all the while in danger of being dragged further and further into the morass. There is no hope in a world of inherent existence. Borrowing the newly-minted Nobel Laureate to make this point:

Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, and how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take ’till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Luckily the world is empty of inherent existence. As Gen-la Khyenrab explained in the Festival, emptiness is the true nature of phenomena. Emptiness is not nothingness; it is the opposite of nothingness. It is because of emptiness that everything can exist.

Because emptiness is possible, everything is possible. ~ Nagarjuna

So emptiness means that things can change completely and radically – that this otherwise intractably tangled mess of samsara can be unravelled by pulling on a single thread.

From enlightened beings’ point of view, we are already pure. Geshe Kelsang said in Portugal in 2009, for example, that he views us all as Heroines and Heroes, which is why he has so much respect for us. And this seems to be why he has never tired in liberating us, why he finds it effortless. Buddhas understand that we are not inherently pure, and that from our point of view we can feel far from pure. But that is just a point of view, and when we stop “awfulizing everything” with our inappropriate attention, as a friend put it the other day, and improve our imagination or imputation based on wisdom, we will see ourselves and others in a completely different way. No more “real” but infinitely more enjoyable.

Of the three steps to overcoming our delusions taught in the mind-training teachings of Buddhism, the first is recognizing or identifying them. And that means not just intellectually but in our own minds. We identify them but we don’t identify WITH them — the difference is crucial. (The next two steps are overcoming them by applying their opponents and uprooting them completely with the wisdom that realizes emptiness.)

Monsters in the cellar

It is far better not to repress those bits of our mind that we don’t like. These delusions and the bad karmic appearances they spawn are not intrinsic to our mind but, while we fail to accept that they are there, they continue to lurk in our mental cellar. Even when they don’t jump out and terrify us, they still haunt us. They cause us unease and painful feelings without our even knowing why we are feeling this way. Do you ever find life a bit spooky, or is that just me? I think life is a bit spooky when we are living under the influence of unacknowledged mental monsters. We sort of know they’re all there, which is why we try to keep that cellar door firmly shut and bolted.

We have various strategies to avoid them, as mentioned here, but they’re not really working. You’ve seen horror movies, maybe — you know what people do to try and pretend there are no monsters in the cellar. They blame the creepy neighbors, distract themselves, and/or get blind drunk. Or they try to leave the house, but of course that never goes well (we cannot leave our minds.)

Whatever they do, the terror still creeps up the stairs and through the cracks in the doors and windows; and it always seems to maintain the element of surprise. They know that, so they are never truly comfortable; they live in fear.

Our refusal to own our delusions pushes them into the cellar, where they exert enormous unseen influence over what we do in life. We need instead to have the confidence and authenticity to bring these inner demons of the delusions out into the open, invite them to show their faces in the light of our pure, indestructible potential, so we can (1) see that there is nothing to be scared of, they are not so intolerable, and we are far bigger and stronger than them; and (2) be prepared to learn from them to see what is really happening in our mind. Check out this article for more on how to do this.

Moving beyond

We cannot completely and whole-heartedly accept who we are or where we’re at if there are aspects of our mind that we are too afraid (or alternatively too self-satisfied) to explore. And if we cannot accept who we are, we cannot change who we are. If we want to improve, we need to take ownership and responsibility for our delusions, taking a good honest look at them rather than denying them or rejecting them outright.

Once we acknowledge instead of avoiding one of these dark traits or habit patterns, it will cease to have the same control over us. We will also see more clearly that we are not our delusions, that they come and go like clouds in a clear sky, like weather.

For example, we cannot move beyond our habitual dislike for others — that, “I don’t really like people very much, at least till I get to know them, and even then…” mind — until we realize we possess this mind of self-protective aversion, which is projecting unlikeability onto the mess of humanity (probably starting with ourselves). At the same time, we need to see that we are not the aversion, that our real nature is connectivity and affection.

One of the most valuable things I did during my longish retreat a few years ago was look at my delusions head on in this way, not papering them over with unapplied generalities of Dharma, not shoving them under the carpet, not pretending they were not there. I came to discover that when I had a strong delusion, my subsequent meditation session was even stronger as a result, such that I actively came to enjoy my delusions in a funny kind of way, certainly they lost a lot of their power to scare me or influence me. They became more objects of curiosity, of challenge. I’m not saying I have anywhere near mastered this yet, of course; it is a life-long practice and our delusions have many levels. (We always have to be on the look out for complacency and self-satisfaction too, which can rear their lazy heads when our mind is feeling comfortable.) But I do have total confidence in the possibility of genuinely accepting all our delusions, however shadowy, and letting them go with the help of applied Dharma.

More coming later! Meanwhile, please share your comments below on how you deal with the monsters in your cellar.

Maybe we switch on a miniseries on Netflix for 6 hours, get drunk, run away, try and put ourselves somewhere else. We are trying to get away from our own thoughts, but what we resist persists; and by ignoring, repressing, or denying what is going on inside the more intrusive our thoughts become. Undealt with thoughts have a habit of coming back and biting us even harder the next time. What happens to a jack in the box when we try to push him down?

Do you remember me mentioning this experiment in Science Journal? The scientists got 700 people to sit in a room on their own, that was the experiment! But … they took away their smartphones. Horror! And how long do you think those poor souls lasted? Apparently all of 6 to 15 minutes before they preferred to administer themselves with electric shocks than endure any more time in solitary confinement. People are seemingly incapable of sitting with their thoughts due to unaccepted and unprocessed grief, loss, sadness – so, when left alone, they started to get sad. People everywhere have lost the art of accepting, processing, working through, letting go, moving on.

So, suppressing our unhappy thoughts is not the way to get rid of them, whereas accepting that they are there, like clouds, is the beginning of being able to transform them. We need to let them be, without panicking. As Ven Geshe Kelsang says in How to Solve Our Human Problems:

Unfortunately, by reacting so quickly we do not give ourself the time to see what is actually going on in our mind. In reality, the painful feelings that arise on such occasions are not intolerable. They are only feelings, a few moments of bad weather in the mind, with no power to cause us any lasting harm. There is no need to take them so seriously.

Phew, what a relief!

No need for internal conflict

So, instead of trying to immediately get rid of an unpleasant feeling with blame, suppression, or distraction, we can instead be confident enough to welcome it, saying: “Come in! Sit down! Join us! I find you not so intolerable really, you are in fact quite interesting, like a weird grey cloud formation; but bear in mind that I don’t believe a word you are saying, not for a moment. Your advice has always been blinkered and disastrous. I prefer the advice of my wise friends over here, my friend patience for example. You’re acting all self-important as usual, but there is plenty else going on in my life and my mind if I think about it.” We have perspective. However bombastic or seductive they may be, we stop giving them the platform, stop listening to them, stop writing stories about them. We realize our delusions are ludicrous and self-seeking and stop taking them so seriously. (Hmmm, could be writing this about the upcoming US elections.)

DON’T PANIC!

Geshe Kelsang says:

Just as there is room in the sky for a thunderstorm, so there is room in the vast space of our mind for a few painful feelings; and just as a storm has no power to destroy the sky, so unpleasant feelings have no power to destroy our mind. When painful feelings arise in our mind, there is no need to panic.

Love that last line. It reminds me of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When I read this book in the past, I started saying this to myself when thoughts seemed to be racing away with themselves, “DON’T PANIC!” We panic – “I can’t handle this!”, and we spin out of control because we can’t handle this feeling of being upset or betrayed or lonely. It fills our mind and we overreact. We give our thoughts power, not realizing that there is nothing behind them. Literally nothing. We really don’t like being unhappy and because we have no patience with it, we are not accepting it, we feel actually hurt by it — which means it sits there looking inherently horrible, all solid and real.

How effective is it to cling onto misery really tightly while at the same time wishing it would go away?

I was in New York in January for the monster Storm Jonas, but within a day the sky was crystal clear again. We know this about weather, so we don’t panic that we are never going to see the sun again. I used to even enjoy the raging thunderstorms in Florida, knowing that in a day or two the sky would be blue once more. We can be more like this with our minds and our moods.

So we don’t pretend that unhappiness is not there, but we do know that this thunderstorm is not all that big shakes, that it’ll pass, that it is never going to destroy my sky-like mind. This gives us the space and wisdom to see more deeply why we feel mad or jealous or anxious or saturated with longing — how these painful appearances, however overwhelming they seem, are arising, for example, from the unfurling of the karma in our mind — just karmic projection.

Lamrim has solutions

If we have studied and appreciate the Lamrim meditations, we can think for example that this unhappiness is reminding me to clean up the projector of my delusions and negative karma while I still have the time to do so, while I am still breathing, in this precious human life. I am on parole from the lower realms – states of existence where suffering appearances are so overpowering that there is no longer anything we can do about them and we have no idea that we even have a choice. I’m going to break parole and flee to the Pure Land, I owe nothing to Officers Self-Grasping & Self-Cherishing, I’m not going back with them. Then I’ll be in a position to start busting everyone else out of samsara’s prison too because they don’t belong here any more than I do.

Slowly but surely we take responsibility to transform our minds to view the world in different ways, ways that don’t engender feelings of unhappiness and further delusions in the first place. Eventually we learn to control what weather comes up in our mind, which will help us now and always, and allow us to be there for others.